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Case Study

Lonza’s mission impossible: Supplying the world with mRNA vaccines

By Niccolò Pisani, Alexander Klein, Radostina Stanisheva, Teodor Stoev and Philip Sieber-Gasser

18 pages

June 2023

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Reference: IMD-7-2429

At the beginning of 2020, a few weeks before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, André Goerke, the Head of Value Chain Management at Lonza – a leading pharmaceutical contract development and manufacturing company based in Switzerland – had just completed the merger of two global business units into a new biotech business unit of the company. After returning from a wonderful day of snowboarding, André received a phone call from his friend Juan Andres that would change his professional focus for the next two years. Juan had become the Head of Technical Operations at the US biotech start-up Moderna – which was working on various early-stage drugs using the novel mRNA technology. The world had been watching with sorrow as cases of COVID-19 appeared in Europe, and stock markets across the globe were in free fall. After learning of these mounting concerns about a pandemic, Moderna had immediately started sequencing the COVID-19 virus. It was convinced that it had an effective and safe mRNA sequence that could serve as a vaccine against the virus. But it had not been able to manufacture anywhere near the volume necessary to fight a global pandemic. Hence, Juan asked André if Lonza could set up a global supply chain and be Moderna’s active ingredient partner to manufacture hundreds of millions of mRNA vaccine doses a year. André sensed that this was an incredible opportunity, but there were several risks involved, including counterparty, technology, legal, regulatory, supply chain and HR risks. From multiple angles, this looked like a mission impossible for Lonza, especially since manufacturing was expected to start by the end of 2020.

Learning Objective

How to make far-reaching strategic decisions with imperfect information at hand.
Lessons on organizational design, customer centricity and the adaptive strategy approach.
The importance of leadership with purpose and corporate culture in steering companies through phases of disruptive transformation.

Keywords

Disruption, General Management, Global Business, Strategy, Leadership, COVID-19, Vaccine, Messenger Ribonucleic Acid, Innovation, Healthcare

Settings

World/global
Lonza Group, Manufacturing, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals
2020-2022

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English

Related material

Teaching note

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